How family background affects students’ fields of study across different historical periods in China is not well studied. Post 1949, China explicitly prioritized specific industrial sectors when allocating resources, creating an especially strong reason to expect that the industrial sector in which a parent was employed might strongly influence a child’s educational outcomes and career aspirations. Using data from the school registration records of 51,801 students who entered an elite regional university from 1952 through 2002, this study is the first to examine the role of parents’ industrial sectors in predicting children’s fields of study and the temporal patterns of this association. Applying multinomial logistic regression and the log-multiplicative layer effect model, we found that parents’ industrial sectors predicted children’s fields of study independent of parents’ broad categories of occupation. The strength of the association was particularly strong during the Cultural Revolution and post-market transition periods.

Abstract This article takes advantage of three new big historical datasets to identify four salient features of the Chinese academe during the Republic of China. First, it was highly international in terms of training. Second, the proportion of female students was unexpectedly large. Third, there was a heavy emphasis on STEM subjects. Finally, the social and spatial origins of China's university students and university faculty members changed from a national population of civil servant families to business and professional families largely from Jiangnan and the Pearl River Delta. The datasets are the China University Student Dataset – Republic of China, which includes almost half of all students to graduate from a Chinese university during the first half of the 20th century; the China University Student Dataset – Overseas, which includes the vast majority of all Chinese students to graduate from a North American, European or Japanese university during this same period; and the China University Employee Dataset, which includes almost all university faculty members in China, 1941–1950.

This paper examines the consequences of political, economic and social change in mid-twentieth century China for patterns of assortative mating by both education and class. Traditionally in China, marriages were arranged by parents, and ideally matched families of similar socioeconomic status. However, the Marriage Law passed by the People’s Republic of China in 1950 promoted free choice and forbade arranged marriage and other interference by families in the marriage decisions of their children. Later, Land Reform, Collectivization and other movements had profound impacts on rural household organization and social relations. We investigate their effects on assortative mating by using novel linked administrative data compiled in rural Shanxi Province in North China in the mid-1960s. These data record the education and family class labels (jiating chushen) of spouses for 1459 couples in 30 villages. The class labels were assigned in the 1950s based on family landholding before the Land Reform and became hereditary. We find that class label had effects above and beyond those of education, suggesting that assortative mating studies that only consider education overlook an important dimension of social status in marriage patterns, and thereby overstate the overall permeability of boundaries between social groups. Furthermore, by comparing couples according to whether they married before or after 1949, we find that patterns of homogamy and hypergamy remained highly stable in the face of substantial social transformation after 1949.

AbstractWe introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential.

In the past, many people were 'unfree' in the sense that their movement was restricted, and out-migration without permission was regarded and recorded as 'escape.' Even though such escape was common in the past, historical studies mostly neglect this form of migration. This paper examines escape in historical East Asia, focusing on the influence of household context and individual characteristics on the chances of escape, taking advantage of large-scale individual panel datasets from three adjacent unfree populations from northeast China, southeast Korea and northeast Japan in the 18th and 19th century. We not only find similar temporal, spatial, and age patterns of escape, but also similar patterns of associations between chances of escape and household context. In particular, the presence of dependent children and elderly in the household makes individuals less likely to escape. Other patterns of association also highlight the importance of gender and social class. Despite significant differences in political, social, and community context across these three East Asian populations, our empirical comparisons suggest important commonalities in terms of motivation driven by shared understandings of obligation to others.

Unlike previous migration studies which mainly focus on individual migration, this article examines the long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration and resettlement. Using a unique Chinese historical population database, we trace 30,517 males from childhood onwards between 1792 and 1909, 542 of whom experienced childhood migration. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis and include a fixed effect of common grandfather to account for unobservable characteristics of the extended family. We also explore the influence of social networks on early-life migration experience by including kin network at destination. Our findings suggest that migration in childhood has substantial long-term effects on survivorship in later ages. From age 16 sui to 45 sui, kin network at destination mediates the negative effects of childhood migration and lowers mortality risks. Moreover, child migrants who survive to older ages subsequently experience lower mortality. Such findings contribute to a better understanding of the implications of social behavior and social context for human health.